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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2427 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Not sure if it’s too early to tell, really — it’s consistently high, provided there’s available farmland. What definitely is too early to tell, however, is whether the Amish or Mennonite who leave agriculture will continue to have a high birth rate. Or maybe there’s already a study on that which I need to read.

The not-particularly-strict Mennonites that I know seem to maintain the same sort of lifestyle when they start construction or other businesses -- I'm pretty sure it's mostly the church and community support. Whether they can maintain this is another story -- I don't really know any "urban Mennonites", or if that's even a thing.

Yeah - you obviously aren't going to maintain Western Civilisation with Old Order Amish. Whether or not you can maintain it with car-driving Mennonites is an open question, but the odds don't look good. David Friedmann's account of Amish "law" in Legal Systems Very Different from our Own was that Amish minimise trust-requiring interactions with other Amish under a different Ordnung, let alone the English. If the same is true of Mennonites more broadly, then they aren't going to be building a 5nm fab any time soon.

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